Who Was Fusajiro Yamauchi?

Fusajiro Yamauchi was the founder of the Nintendo company, although he died before video games were first invented. Nintendo came out of the Japanese government's acceptance of a new card game called Hanafuda. This was the first card game allowed in Japan in over 250 years, as all other foreign card games were banned due to illegal gambling. The Hanafuda cards had illustrations in place of numbers.

Yamauchi was born in 1859 in Kyoto, Japan and had a daughter named Tei Yamauchi. After becoming a entrepreneur, Yamauchi increased the popularity of the Hanafuda card game by hand-drawing the illustrations used on the cards. He then opened his first Hanafuda card store, called Nintendo Koppai, in 1889. After the popularity of Hanafuda grew, Nintendo became the most popular game company in Japan. Yamauchi continued to expand the company by opening more card stores and developing more original card games.

Yamauchi retired from the company in 1929, leaving Nintendo in the hands of his son-in-law, Sekiryo Kaneda. In 1940, Yamauchi died of a stroke well before Nintendo created its entertainment system that would make it into a dominant company in the video game industry. Nintendo went on to create the Nintendo Wii, the first gaming console to sell 10 million systems in one year.